Questionnaire

An Institutional Readiness questionnaire, developed by the Northern Alliance ATTC, has been utilised by its NHS partners to benchmark their Institutional Readiness (IR) for four exemplar Advanced Therapies. This work will help identify and address any gaps that may impact these hospitals’ ability to deliver such innovative medicines.

The work, undertaken as part of Work Package 4 Infrastructure, Reimbursement and Outcomes, is being led by Ewan Morrison (NHS NSS) and Greg Amatt (Chiesi Ltd).  Ruaridh Buchan (Scottish Pharmacy Clinical Fellow), Lisa Wotherspoon (University of Edinburgh, Project Manager) and Prof Andrew Webster (University of York) are conducting the analysis of data derived from use of this tool.

An IR Working Group meeting, led by Ewan Morrison and facilitated by the analysis team, provided the opportunity to seek feedback from NHS partner representatives on the usability of the questionnaire. The meeting, held in Newcastle in November 2019, was attended by representatives from all four NA-ATTC NHS sites and provoked insightful and valuable discussions around the topic of IR.  Feedback on the questionnaire was encouraging and has enabled sites not only to highlight areas of strengths in delivering these therapies, but also identify the challenging areas around delivery that can potentially be improved upon over the next year. Alongside this, the first exercise has enabled the team to validate the tool and improvements to it will be made over the coming months.

The report on the first benchmarking exercise will be disseminated in Q1 2020 with the second exercise taking place later the same year.